The GOP's no-compromise pledge

If Republicans take the House as anticipated on election night, voters can expect to hear the customary talk about coming together with Democrats for the good of the country.

President Barack Obama inevitably will extend a hand across the aisle as well.

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But that’s Tuesday. Right now, the tone is a lot different — with Republicans pledging to embrace an agenda for the next two years that sounds a lot like their agenda for the past two: Block Obama at all costs.

And even Obama’s pre-election appeals to cooperation are wrapped in an I’m-still-the-president tone that suggests that Americans will be looking at two opposing camps glaring at each other across the barricades — gridlock all around.

Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We're going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan to National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Obama frequently reminds voters he believes all the delay in Washington this year is the Republicans’ fault.

“So I hope that my friends on the other side of the aisle are going to change their minds going forward, because putting the American people back to work, boosting our small businesses, rebuilding the economic security of the middle class, these are big national challenges. And we’ve all got a stake in solving them. And it’s not going to be enough just to play politics. You can’t just focus on the next election. You’ve got to focus on the next generation,” Obama said a recent event in Rhode Island.

It is popular to compare 2010 with 1994. Pundits point to a rejection of an overreaching Democratic president, a swing of moderate and independent voters to Republican ranks and a grass-roots groundswell that brings dozens of new faces to Washington.

But the second part of the prediction foresees that Obama will moderate his goals, Republicans will cool their tone and Washington will be able to responsibly address major issues.

Republicans are sounding like they’re not interested in that part.

To be sure, some of this is political trash-talk, each side trying to stoke up its partisans in the closing hours of the election. Republicans have premised much of their whole campaign on one idea — stop Obama — and it’s put them on the cusp of taking the House and scoring big gains in the Senate, so there’s no reason to quit now.